Google Investigating Google News Publishers Concerns Over Discovery

After months of complaints in the Google News Help forums from some Google News publishers saying their content is not being surfaced or discovered by their audience in Google News, Google said they are investigating.

Lisa Wang from Google wrote the other day “We’re aware of the concerns some publishers have raised about issues around finding their sites or particular articles in Google News. We’re looking into the reports and will provide an update soon.”

Some publishers are complaining that the only way to find their site in Google News is to do a site command. Otherwise, if you search for topics they’ve written about, their site does not rank in Google News.

It is unclear if Google made a change to the Google News ranking algorithm, or if there is a bug with Google News, a bug with these specific publishers sites or something else.

All I know is that there are many complaints from many publishers and Google finally said they are investigating those complaints.

I did hear off the record from one of these publishers that they did get a direct email back from Google a couple weeks ago that their site is fine and has no specific errors and is thus performing as expected in Google News. But yet the publisher is getting virtually no traffic from Google News.

I guess we wait and see if and when Google responds.

If you are having issues, I assume you should share your details in that thread.